


Memory Aid

by Karartegirl99



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Campaign: Balance (The Adventure Zone), M/M, Memory Loss
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-21
Updated: 2020-04-21
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:00:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23778007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Karartegirl99/pseuds/Karartegirl99
Summary: In his quest to contain the newly-created Animus Bell, Kravitz encounters seven of the highest bounties in his book.(An AU where Taako and Kravitz meet under different circumstances, and are already dating when Taako is Voidfished.)
Relationships: Kravitz/Taako (The Adventure Zone)
Kudos: 30





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Goodness knows if/when I'll finish this, but I figured I'd post what I've got so far.

Kravitz didn’t say so at the time, and maybe he never would, but meeting the IPRE had been little more than a coincidence. ~~~~

It was during his investigation into the Animus Bell (though at the time, of course, he didn’t know that that was what he was looking for). There’d been reports that souls were being tossed around willy-nilly on the prime material plane, and if that wasn’t his jurisdiction, he didn’t know what was. So he took the case, and a dozen arrests and several abandoned leads later, he found himself at the edge of a great battlefield, trying to find the source of the necromantic energy that radiated from its center. ~~~~

Lup had been there spectating, a habit that at the time was new. She turned her head slightly at his arrival but quickly looked back to the field again.

“Uh, excuse me, Miss,” Kravitz asked in his Work Accent. “You wouldn’t happen to know what the devil is going on down there, would you?”

“Yeah,” Lup said. She seemed sad. Kravitz supposed that made sense, given the bloodshed before her. “They’re fighting over Barry’s artifact again. You gonna join the fight, I guess?”

“Barry, Barry… Bluejeans?” Kravitz asked.

Lup nodded. “You know him?”

Kravitz conjured his book and flipped to the latest page. Sure enough, Barry was one of the seven bounties that had literally appeared overnight a few months back. Kravitz sighed. If he was honest, he had been hoping he could get someone else to take this guy down. “He’s a lich, isn’t he?” he asked. And a pretty powerful one, he thought. Still kicking after several distinct deaths.

Lup, sensing that this merited her full attention, turned away from the battle completely. “Uh, yeah, he is. How exactly do you know Barry?” she asked, narrowing her eyes.

Kravitz looked at Lup, then back at the names in his book. “I see you’re a lich, too, Miss…Tay-co?”

“It’s ‘Taaco’,” she corrected, “And, yeah, yeah I am. Now do you mind telling me who the hell _you_ are and what the hell kind of book you’ve got there?”

“I have many names—” Kravitz began.

“Just need one.”

“Kravitz,” said Kravitz. “Maybe we can come to some sort of arrangement, Miss Taaco. You’ve got quite a lot of transgressions on your file, but I’m willing to shorten your sentence in exchange for your cooperation. I’m mostly here because of, well, that,” he said, gesturing to the chaos on the field in front of them. “Know how I can put an end to it?”

Lup was caught between the desire to help him and the need to ask what “sentence” he was referring to and who he thought he was, anyway, talking to her like that? In the end, her good nature won out. “If you can find a way to get the Bell away from them,” she told him, “then _maybe_ the thrall would wear off. Probably, everyone will just start attacking you instead.”

“Alrighty then,” Kravitz said. “And what Bell is this, exactly?”

“If I told you, you’d just run off and join the battle like the rest of them.” She went back to watching the fight. “Shouldn’t’ve said anything,” she muttered.

“Ma’am, if there’s a powerful necromantic artifact over there, I’m not leaving until I have it properly contained. Please tell me anything you can.”

With a sigh, she explained to him then about the Light of Creation, and the Relics and their thrall, and how it was the best plan she and her friends could come up with to keep all of reality from being consumed. Kravitz, who had heard a great variety of religious doctrines in his time policing necromantic cults, was not particularly impressed. Still, he nodded solemnly as Lup spoke, and when she finished he said, “So get the bell and all of this will go back to normal, right?”

“Be my guest, dude,” Lup said, gesturing.

Kravitz took a minute to ponder the situation. In the end, he settled on his usual approach: rifting in in full reaper form and seeing if he could get everyone to come quietly. Or in this case, he supposed, just back off and calm down. He doubted every single person on the field was a death criminal, after all.

To his dismay, however, the people who were in the center of the battle for the Bell were also the type of people who were least likely to be shaken by the sight of a skeleton appearing out of thin air and threatening them in bad Cockney. Most of them were death cultists or demonic warlocks or hardened necromancers, and they were all so determined in their individual quests to get the bell that the Grim Reaper seemed to them to be just another opponent to overcome in the process. Kravitz had gotten as far as “By Order of the Raven Queen” when seventeen spells, a halberd, and a rock were all thrown his way, knocking him off balance.

And the bell, by the Gods, was just making things worse! As it kept switching hands, souls themselves were switching places left and right. Even Kravitz got shoved into a stranger’s corporeal form a couple times, which he didn’t care for at all. After a few hours of this, though, when everyone else had either died horribly or retreated to fight another day, Kravitz walked victoriously over to where Lup was still watching patiently.

“I did it!” he shouted. “I did it.”

“You sure did, bucko.”

"Now tell me how to destroy it.”

Lup tilted her head to the side, biting her lip. “Well…”

Kravitz’s smile vanished. “How do I destroy it?” he asked firmly.

“I don’t know that you can,” Lup admitted. “We tried destroying the Light, and _that_ didn’t work, so breaking the artifacts probably wouldn’t do any good, either. Your best bet would be to hide it somewhere no one could ever find it again. Like drop it in the ocean, maybe?”

Kravitz looked down at the bell in his hands, studying it. “I guess if I put it in the Eternal Stockade, no one could get to it. Yeah, that’d work well enough,” he decided. He opened a small rift with his scythe and sent the bell through. He turned back to Lup. “Thank you for all your help, Lup. It’s been much appreciated. But here comes the unpleasant part.”

“You fighting off all of those wannabe-liches wasn’t the unpleasant part?”

“I—no. Lup Taaco, I’m going to have to ask you to come with me.”

Kravitz hadn’t noticed her umbrella earlier, but he did now, and Lup’s grip around the handle had tightened in a way that didn’t sit well with him for some reason. “Wanna tell me why?” she asked, trying to keep her voice casual.

“You’ve violated the natural order of things,” Kravitz sighed. “You’re a lich, Lup. You’re on my bounty list.”

“Were you not listening when I explained to you about the Light and the Hunger and the hundred years of running away? I kinda had a good reason for that,” Lup said with a huff.

“Yeah, I was listening,” Kravitz answered. “I was listening enough to deduce that you’re friends with the other six major bounties in my book, so maybe while we’re at it you could tell me where to find them.”

Without warning, Lup blasted a fireball out of the tip of the umbra staff. Kravitz was in his skeletal form, but the heat was still painfully searing, and the force of the blow was enough to knock him backwards several feet. “Alright, that’s it!” Kravitz shouted, readying his scythe. “You wanna die painfully, be my guest!”

Now, Kravitz had been a reaper long enough to know that bones don’t really melt, exactly. They’re too complex, and in any case, the melting points of their individual components are so high that most bones would never get a chance to come close. But fighting an enraged Lup at the height of her power was enough to make Kravitz think that maybe bones could melt, actually, and scientists just didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. With every attack he dodged, her spells got hotter and hotter. The air around them was slowly starting to turn to plasma, and Kravitz could feel what was left of his periosteum sliding down his features like sweat. Any damage to his form was purely temporary, though, and Lup knew this. She just kept on throwing every spell she had at him, trying to create as much distance between them as possible.

“Enough!” Kravitz at last announced, in what he hoped was a dramatic and intimidating bellow.

Lup threw another fireball his way.

“Really?” Kravitz said as he dodged it. “I said I’m done. That’s your cue to stop attacking.”

“You said ‘enough,’” Lup pointed out.

For several seconds, Kravitz just held his skull in his hands. “Fine. I’ve had enough of this for one day. You’re a good fighter, Lup, and I’m thankful you helped with the Bell, I really am. But I’m gonna head back to the astral plane now, and once I’ve regrown to my full power and maybe had some coffee or something, it’s over for you liches.” With this, he tore open a rift and departed.

Lup let the fire in her hands slowly sizzle out.


	2. Chapter 2

Kravitz’s first meeting with the rest of the IPRE could have gone worse, but it could have gone a lot better, too. ~~~~

That day, Lup woke up from her depression nap a good three hours before she had intended to, shocked awake by the sounds of shouting. Her initial annoyance turned quickly to panic, and she hopped out of bed, threw her jacket on over her nightgown, and rushed out to see what all the commotion was about. She wasn't at all surprised when she came onto the deck to find that Kravitz was there, but she was, she admits, a bit confused by the rest of the scene she saw.

Merle and Davenport, for one thing, were off to the side, picking up the pieces of a backgammon board that had apparently fallen off of the table. Magnus was sitting a little ways away from them, bandaging the knuckles on his right hand. The three of them kept shooting glances to where Taako, Barry, and Lucretia were exchanging words with a rather irritated-looking Kravitz. One of Lucretia’s shields glimmered around Kravitz, effectively imprisoning him.

“Look, my dude,” Taako was saying. “I’m just sayin’, if you have to leave a battle early, you haven’t really won.”

“That’s not—I wasn’t—I wasn’t ‘leaving the battle early’,” Kravitz responded. “I just didn’t feel like fighting another powerful lich that day.”

“She _is_ pretty powerful,” Barry agreed.

“Yeah, I can see why you were afraid of her,” Taako said with a grin.

Lucretia noticed Lup watching and waved her over. “This is the guy you were telling us about, right?” she asked her.

“Uh, yeah, that’s the skeleton that tried to kill me and threatened all of you guys. Quick question: what the fuck?” said Lup.

Taako gestured at Kravitz. “Tall, dead, and handsome here was just telling us about how you kicked his ass the other day.”

“She did _not_ kick my ass,” Kravitz told Taako. “You did not kick my ass,” he repeated to Lup, for good measure.

“Taako, stop teasing the Death God,” said Barry.

Lucretia sighed. To Lup, she said, “Please, do something. I can’t keep this barrier up forever.”

“How did all this happen?” Lup asked her.

“Oh, I don’t know… he snuck on the ship and starting threatening our eternal souls, Magnus punched him—”

“It hurt,” Magnus chimed in.

“Yeah, that… that tends to happen when you punch a skeleton,” said Barry.

“Well, he didn’t look like a skeleton when I punched him!”

Lucretia pinched the bridge of her nose with one hand. Lup patted her on the shoulder, then turned to Kravitz. “Get lost,” she told him.

“You’re not really in a position of authority to tell me that,” said Kravitz.

“And drop the stupid accent,” she added.

Kravitz frowned. “It’s my work accent.”

“ _Work_ accent?” Taako sputtered.

“It helps me catch my bounties,” he insisted.

“ _Work accent,_ ” Taako wheezed, doubling over with barely restrained laughter.

Kravitz nodded at Lup. “See? Now I’ve got him off his game.”

“My brother’s not your goddamn bounty,” Lup said with a huff. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll get the hell off of our ship and leave us alone.”

“You know I can’t do that. You all have died many, many times. Two of you are _liches_. You know I can’t just let you get away with that sort of thing, right?”

“Hey, it wasn’t like we _wanted_ to die all those times!” Taako argued.

Merle, who had just finished getting all the backgammon pieces back into the box, made his way over to them. “Fellas, fellas,” he said. “Let’s all take a deep breath. I’m sure we can come to a solution that doesn’t involve murdering anybody.”

“Yeah, I second that,” said Barry.

“I, too, would like to not be murdered,” said Magnus.

“Well, then, come on over, bud!” Merle said with a welcoming wave of the arm. “You too, Davenport, join the party. Let’s get some good-old-fashioned group mediation goin’.”

Everyone was gathered around Kravitz now, careful to keep a safe distance in case the shield went down. Kravitz looked like he was debating just rifting the hell out of there. Instead, though, he turned to Merle and asked, “What kind of agreement do you have in mind, exactly?”

“Well, I think you can agree we had a sort of, shall we say, extenuating circumstances thing what with all the planar travel and apocalypses and stuff. Like Taako said, it wasn’t like we planned on dyin’ and comin’ back to life, it just sort of happened.”

“So you want amnesty, is that it?”

Merle nodded.

Kravitz sighed. “I can see why this is an unusual case, but you have to admit, you all should have died a long, long time ago. Even if you were somehow pardoned of all your past deaths, you said you’ve been traveling for over a century. The humans among you should no doubt be dead by now.”

Magnus, Lucretia, and Barry shared a concerned look. If it came down to it, there wasn’t a good counterargument to this, and they knew it.

“Not only that,” Kravitz continued, “but becoming liches isn’t something that ‘just sort of happens’. That was premeditated. There’s no way I can excuse you for doing something you knew was against the will of the Raven Queen.”

“Well, fuck,” said Magnus.

“Now hold up,” said Barry. “We only did the lich ceremony because we knew we were going to come back to life at the end of each cycle anyway. It just, you know, expedited the process.”

“And uh, we did kind of save your planar system an’ all,” said Taako. “Just throwin’ that out there.”

Kravitz frowned. “That’s another thing. I’m just supposed to _believe_ all of this about an interplanar hivemind you ran from for a century straight?”

“Hey, if you don’t believe it, Luc’s journals have more than enough detail to prove it,” Magnus said.

Lucretia tensed up at this, as if the subject disagreed with her. “I suppose you could read my journals if it would help.”

“I – That won’t be necessary,” Kravitz assured her. “I’ve made up my mind. The seven of you will be coming with me.”

This was an absurd threat to make when he was still shielded off and highly outnumbered, but before anyone could call attention to this, Merle said, “Would you like to hear my counter-offer?”

“Alright, what is it?”

“How about you let us live the rest of these lives we’re living right now, huh? I mean, you’ll get us in the end, after all. And we’re not on the run anymore, so we won’t keep resetting every year, and there’s not really a need for Lup ‘n’ Barry to be liches anymore. So you leave us be, and then when we die of old age, we’ll come quietly. How about that?”

“How do I know the second my back is turned you won’t all just fly away in your starship?”

“Because we won’t do that,” Merle answered, apparently as chipper as ever.

Kravitz sighed. He was doing a lot of sighing on this job, he noticed. “I can’t let you go now if I won’t be able to find you again.”

“Would it help if we offer you some sort of collateral?” Davenport offered.

“Yeah, what’s bail set at?” Magnus asked.

“Guys, guys,” Taako interrupted. “I think your favorite flip wizard has a solution that will satisfy everyone. Consider this: parole.” He turned to Kravitz. “You let us go on good behavior and then you, like, check in with us every month or so. That way you don’t need to worry about us going into hiding or whatever, and as a bonus, I get to keep seeing that pretty face on a semi-regular basis. How about it, fella?”

Kravitz didn’t particularly relish the idea of being a parole officer, just like the IPRE weren’t exactly overjoyed to have him as one. But they hated it less than they hated the prospect of having to fight each other, that was for sure. At last Kravtiz said, “I’ll have to ask the Raven Queen about this.”

“Sure, sure,” said Taako. “Totally understandable.”

“Tell her I said ‘hi’,” said Barry.

Kravitz groaned and rifted back to the Astral Plane. When it was clear he was really gone, Lucretia broke her concentration, and her shield disappeared. “Well, today has certainly been…eventful. I’m gonna go strengthen the ship’s wards, if anyone wants to join me.”

“Wait, is he not coming back?” asked Magnus.

“Eh, who cares, Lup can always just kick his ass again anyway.” Merle made his way back over to the backgammon board. “Hey, Dav, do you remember whose turn it was?”


End file.
